In September 2018, two men appeared on Russian state television claiming they had visited the English city of Salisbury as tourists, drawn by its cathedral. British authorities told a different story. They identified the men as suspects in the nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Bellingcat, a small investigative group specializing in open-source threat intelligence (OSINT), set out to identify the men using nothing but publicly available data. They started with the passport information released by British police and traced it back to a Moscow processing center used almost exclusively by GRU agents. They cross-referenced leaked Russian databases of vehicle registrations and residents. They searched through yearbook photos from military academies. Working with journalists from Radio Svoboda, Bellingcat found a photograph, uploaded by a visitor to a military academy in 2017, showing a portrait with a name beneath it: Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, matching the face of one of the suspects. A citizen-led investigation, […]